Helmer Herrera

Helmer "Pacho" Herrera (24 August 1951-4 November 1998) was the fourth-in-command of the Colombian Cali Cartel and a major enemy of Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel.

Biography
Helmer Herrera was born on 24 August 1951 in Palmira, Valle del Cauca, Colombia. He studied technical maintenance, and he worked in the United States as a jewel and precious metals broker until he began selling cocaine in New York City. In 1975 and 1978, he was arrested on distribution charges. In 1983, he headed back to Colombia and negotiated supply and distribution rights with the Cali Cartel for New York, opening up routes through Mexico that he had already established. Soon, he became the Cali leader in Jamundi, Palmira, and Yumbo, three major cities. Herrera hired guerrillas from FARC and M-19 to guard his drug labs in Colombia, turning communists into mercenaries.

War with Medellin
During the 1980s, he formed a rivalry with Pablo Escobar and the powerful Medellin Cartel, as they could not agree over which cartel would be allowed to distribute drugs to the city of Los Angeles. Herrera decided to talk to him about sharing the city, but Herrera secretly met with the disaffected Ochoa Brothers and decided to collaborate against him. The bombing of Escobar's apartment failed, leaving his daughter deaf in the left ear, so the Ochoa Brothers persuaded him to contact General Jaramillo to fight Escobar. They decided to get rid of Escobar's cousin Gustavo Gaviria, the man who ran his day-to-day operations, to weaken the cartel (as well as to stop his secret sexual relationship with their sister Marina Ochoa). Gaviria was whacked on 12 August 1990 by the police, and journalist Valeria Velez later told Escobar that it was the Ochoa Brothers who betrayed him, as she discovered that they were in Cali at the time of Gaviria's assassination. Escobar sent his men to massacre the Cali Cartel and assassinate Herrera at a soccer match in Cali, but Herrera was not one of the fourteen cartel members to be killed, as he was dressed the same as the rest of them.